Last week, the White House budget office took the extraordinary step of classifying Internal Revenue Service employees who process tax refunds as "essential" and recalling at least 30,000 to return to work without pay. But hundreds of those un-furloughed workers are staying home, requesting and receiving "hardship" exemptions that, under their union contract, allow them to skip work during a shutdown if they can't afford to work for free, The Washington Post reports.

"Trump has expressed an interest in making sure that tax refunds are paid out next month, believing that if they are delayed he could face major public backlash," the Post reports. But IRS workers who help process refunds and answer taxpayer questions are among the lowest-paid at the agency. "They are definitely angry that they're not getting paid, and maybe some of them are angry enough to express their anger this way," said Tony Reardon, president of the 150,000-member National Treasury Employees Union. "But these employees live paycheck to paycheck, and they can't scrape up the dollars to get to work or pay for child care."

If the number of IRS workers staying home rises, as union officials say they expect it will, refunds will likely be delayed. The IRS won't say how many workers are out on hardship leave, and IRS spokesman Matt Leas tells the Post that the agency is busy preparing for next week's start of tax filing season, "we are continuing our recall operations, and we continue to assess the situation at this time." You can read about some of the hardships at The Washington Post. Peter Weber

Jussie Smollett returned to work the day of his arrest and reportedly told Empire's cast and crew he's innocent.

Chicago police on Thursday arrested Smollett after a grand jury charged him with one count of felony disorderly conduct for allegedly filing a false police report. Authorities said in a press conference that Smollett had staged an attack against himself because he was dissatisfied with his salary on Empire.

Empire is currently in the middle of production on the end of its fifth season. Smollett returned to work Thursday after paying a $10,000 bond, and according to CNN, he apologized to the cast and crew in a meeting. But he continued to maintain his innocence, which left one source in attendance "shocked and dismayed," CNN writes.

Fox said prior to Smollett's arrest that he is not being written off Empire after reports his scenes were being scaled back. But the network said Thursday, "We are evaluating the situation and we are considering our options."

Smollett has not commented publicly since being charged, but his lawyers said in a statement Thursday that he "fiercely and solemnly maintains his innocence and feels betrayed by a system that apparently wants to skip due process and proceed directly to sentencing." Chicago police say they have evidence that Smollett orchestrated the supposed hate crime, including a check written to the men he said attacked him. Brendan Morrow

Rachel Maddow added a little something special to the historical record on MSNBC Thursday night, and she says it's pretty relevant to today's geopolitical situation. She began with a note Vice President George H.W. Bush wrote to disgraced former Vice President Spiro Agnew in October 1988, thanking him for his advice right before a game-changing presidential debate against Michael Dukakis. Agnew, Maddow reminded viewers, had resigned in 1973, right before Watergate broke, and narrowly avoided jail for tax fraud.

But her main event was a secret deal between Agnew and the Saudi crown prince in 1980. It starts with a telex in which Agnew begs the crown prince for an audience to address "a personal emergency that is of critical importance to me." An August 1980 letter spells out what that personal emergency was. Maddow summarized it like this: "Spiro Agnew was writing to the Saudi royal family to solicit their help, their financial support, for him to lead a scorched-earth propaganda campaign in the United States to expose the Jews. To wage a political war on Jews in America."

Specifically, Agnew painted a conspiracy to destroy him by "Zionists" and the media "they" control, and asked for $600,000 that he could live off while he continued "my fight against the Zionist enemies who are destroying my once great nation." And in Maddow's "favorite part," Agnew signed off: "My congratulations to Your Highness on the clear and courageous call to Jihad."

"The jihad-congratulations reference there appears to be a reference to the fact that the Saudi crown prince, just days earlier, had publicly called for a holy war against Israel," Maddow explained. And the Saudis appear to have given him at least $100,000. "Less than 10 years out of office, a former American vice president orchestrated a secret financial deal with Saudi Arabia to fight Jews in this country," she reiterated. "That seems like something that should matter even today," when the same Saudi royal family is in control. Watch below. Peter Weber

Former President Barack Obama was at the Duke-North Carolina game Wednesday night when Duke star Zion Williamson's shoe split, leaving him with a knee injury, and Stephen Colbert showed Obama mouthing "His shoe broke" at the game on Thursday's Late Show. "It's so refreshing to see a president who can actually see a problem and identify it — you know Trump would have said 'Fake shoes,'" he said. "Of course, Obama's not everybody's cup of tea. Some people prefer Trump. For instance a lot of local news stations are owned by a company called the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which has been accused of being pro-Trump."

On Monday, Sinclair made 50 stations broadcast a "must-run video" from chief political analysts and former Trump aide Boris Epshteyn, and one particularly sycophantic suggestion caught Colbert's attention. "Trump on Rushmore might not be that far-fetched because — and I swear this is real — there's a section of the mountain that already kind of looks like him," he said, showing the image. "But if pro-Trump reporting and his aging skinhead fanboys calm, then we've prepared an ever more pro-Trump message from our in-house broadcast team Real News Tonight."

Also on Thursday, Trump friend and longtime adviser Roger Stone was hauled into court over an Instagram post that seemed to threaten Judge Amy Berman Jackson with crosshairs. In one of his funnier excuses, Stone said he thought the crosshairs was a Celtic symbol. "Oh yes," Colbert deadpanned. "It goes back to Roman times when the Celts in Northern Europe used to threaten judges on Instagram."

The judge told Stone she had "serious doubts" he's learned "any lesson at all" and appears "to need clear boundaries" — "Yes, possibly a series of vertical steel boundaries," Colbert suggested — and she gave Stone a full gag order. "So if you want to communicate with Roger Stone," Colbert said, "do it the old-fashioned way and contact him through his Russian hackers." Peter Weber

Federal prosecutors have charged Internal Revenue Service investigative analyst John Fry with leaking confidential suspicious-activity reports (SARs) about Michael Cohen, President Trump's former lawyer, to Michael Avenatti, the attorney representing porn actress Stormy Daniels, according to court documents unsealed in San Francisco on Thursday. SARs flag potentially unlawful bank transactions, and Fry reportedly admitted to describing and sending images of Cohen's SARs to Avenatti in May 2018 and discussing them with New Yorker journalist Ronan Farrow.

The Washington Post and Farrow's New Yorker soon published articles, based on the SARs, tracing Cohen's hush-money payments to Daniels to stay quiet about her purported extramarital affair with Trump. Both articles are cited in the government's criminal complaint. Cohen has since pleaded guilty to campaign finance law violations stemming from those payments, which he says he made on Trump's orders. The SARs also led to the discovery of other shady payments to Cohen. Peter Weber

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw told the Justice Department that he may expand his order from last July that the Trump administration reunite most families separated under President Trump's "zero tolerance" border policy in the light of new evidence that the policy started earlier than originally acknowledged.

"No one but a few in the government knew that these separations had been going on nine or 10 months before, and that hundreds if not thousands of children were" being separated, Sabraw told Justice Department lawyer Scott Stewart. "The court didn't know that and plaintiffs didn't know that, and I don't think government counsel knew that." Stewart pushed back, saying accounting for and reuniting more than the roughly 2,800 families included under Sabraw's original order would "blow the case into some other galaxy" and suggested such an decision may push the Justice Department to fight Sabraw "tooth and nail."

The ACLU, the plaintiff in the case, wants Sabraw to extend his order to all families separated under Trump since July 2017, and ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt said his organization is "prepared, no matter how big the burden is," to continue helping track down separated parents and children, with information provided by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Health and Human Services. The first step is identifying which parents and children have been separated. "It's important to recognize that we're talking about human beings," Sabraw reminded Stewart. "Every person needs to be accounted for."

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has continued separating hundreds of children from their families under a system where U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents untrained in child welfare decide if a parent poses a "danger" to the child, USA Today details. "Family separations are still very much happening in the southern border," Efrén Olivares at the Texas Civil Rights Project tells NBC News. The organization has discovered at least a few wrongly separated families, he added. Peter Weber

Besides bamboo, there's nothing Mei Xiang and Bei Bei love more than frolicking in the snow.

The giant pandas live at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C. During a snowstorm on Wednesday, Mei Xiang, 20, and Bei Bei, 3, went wild, tumbling and doing somersaults on the fresh powder. When they weren't rolling around in the snow, they were climbing trees, falling down from trees, and stopping for bamboo breaks. Watch the adorable video below. Catherine Garcia

For years, an eight-foot sculpture titled "Young Lincoln" has been on display inside the Los Angeles Federal Courthouse. Made in 1941, it's the shirtless, smoldering version of the 16th president, complete with the limestone Lincoln tugging at his waistband (before you get too excited, he's got a book in the other hand). Someone recently snapped a photo of the sculpture and posted it online, and now, people are having a field day renaming the piece, calling it "Babe-raham Lincoln," "The Gettysburg Undress," and "Honest Abs."

The sculpture was made by James Lee Hansen when he was only 23, and at the time of its unveiling, he was criticized for not putting a shirt on the president. Hansen explained that "from a sculpturing standpoint, it's better to show the body without any clothes. That's why I left 'em off." While he could have followed up with "F.D.Rawr," "Young Lincoln" was Hansen's only sculpture of a topless president. Catherine Garcia